World AIDS Day is December 1st, and to commemorate the occasion, the National AIDS Trust (NAT) will be setting up a “Pop-Up Kissing Booth” in London’s Soho Square.

Sponsored by Attitude magazine and Sink The Pink, passerby will have the chance to either make out with an assortment of drag artists or the handsome ginger model Alex Mountain, recently featured in the “Red Hot” campaign.

The booth is a direct response to research that suggests 16 percent of people still believe you can contract HIV merely from kissing — up, astonishingly, from 4 percent 10 years ago.

“The booth is going to be great fun,” says NAT’s chief executive Deborah Gold, “but it also highlights an important message: That too many people in this country believe myths and scaremongering about HIV. This leads to stigma against people living with HIV, and increases the number of people getting the disease. Its time it ends.”

“The numbers of people who don’t know the basic facts about HIV and how it is transmitted is completely shocking,” says Attitude editor Matthew Todd. “And it should be cause for the government to bring in mandatory sex and relationships education in schools. The kissing booth is a fun way to make a really important point — that HIV is still here and more needs to be done to educate people about it.”

Ideally if he has a cold sore or just brushed your teeth or vis versa blood will transfer through saliva and it’ll infect the other person. Giving someone a handshake would’ve been a good way to show that you can’t get it that way and to have mutual understanding.

The British are known to be prone to gimmicks and this one is no exception. It’s sad, in a way. In Britain, they’ve never really been big on gay activism. Much of the gay scene over there is dominated by fetishes rather than by an intellectual pursuit of gay male power.

It’s because Britain is afflicted with what I call “Eurotrash syndrome”.

Wow, I didn’t realize this was STILL a myth in 2015. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the frequent, amazingly ignorant HIV comments from Queerty readers who are presumably GAY and sexually active!

If I could, I’d post a picture from the ‘Gran Fury’/ ACT-UP/Queer Nation days from the 80s, that showed three couples kissing-a same-gender male couple, a same-gender female couple, and an opposite sex couple, with the valued and perspective changing comment, as this: “Kissing doesn’t kill; greed and indifference do.”
It may read a bit dated and sort of ‘of the 80s’ politics, with “Benetton” models and photography style, but it’s still as pertinent today as ever.

In high school, at an all-boys, Jesuit prep school, smart and well-read young gentleman had rationalized wrongly, that I had had AIDS, and it was a rumor I faced at 13 there, before I had ever even acted on my sexual desired sexually. We had a collective class exercise where we were instructed on how best to perform CPR on the computer-aided resuscitation dummy, called “Resusci Annie”, for those not aware. One water-shed moment that both devastated me and shaped me, was that after I taken my turn performing the proper method of CPR efforts on the test manikin, there was still maybe half or most of the class that was then expected as the norm, to then step up and perform the proper procedure on the dummy, to pass that class exercise test. ((As I said, I was thin then-I had lost over 130 pds at that point, going from obese to thin, rather quickly and suspiciously. I had developed anorexia and bulimia, and the very weight-loss effort I jumped into so determinedly and unhealthily to produce better acceptance and less-shame myself, had ironically served to make me only all-the-more suspect of being gay and being sick. This was the time period when Rock Hudson had died, and so many unknown gay or bi male celebrities were effectively ‘outed’ by having the illness. I looked sick. I was. And these teen boys reasoned, fairly I suppose, that whatever was ‘wrong’ with me, was not something they’d welcome to have me effectively kiss them with, and then take them to the painful and dangerously-destructive physical and psychic space I dwelled in. I was hospitalized too, and, of course, I was understood as ‘gay’, sick and the two-plus-two formula was one these young gentlemen had understood and memorized several years earlier. Reason and logic, like homophobia and AIDS-phobia doesn’t need or even exist most often within a rational mind and thinking. I had some unkind names associated with me as well, and i’d rather not revisit them here. So, back to the story: I had taken my turn, and though several were to follow me, no one would willingly step-up and take their turn. The teacher yelled at them, and somehow got the concern, and came back with those alcohol-soaked inch-square packets of gauze, to clean the dummy’s mouth off first. And yes, he DID say something about illnesses and being the wise thing to do, ‘now, these days’, he had said something equivalent to that sort of statement of concern. These little sorts of dangerous and devastating things happened to me, like most all suspect-gay/bi teenage boys, when suddenly, gay men were everywhere, and even wise adults were taken aback by this new visibility by default of illness. In a faith-based education system, the BELIEFS, often counter to science and reason, existed outside of that reality, and whatever sort of real-world, factual expressions of that faith-based view, then are seized upon to support a more logical and, thus, defendable and supportable of that belief system. Smart, brilliant really, educators and teachers had no issue of concern in better objectivity about the issue of disease, when it was so new, and, seemingly, almost existing hand-in-hand with AIDS. “AIDS is God’s way and Mother Nature’s way of dealing with behavior that stands to counter reproductivity of the species.” Other sort of like-minded thoughts and reasons served to be part of the lesson we boys were to learn, WITHIN the frame of Catholicism, and our parents were determined to have us learn, and paid good money to do it. Sadly, the school met and excelled in successfully teaching us boys that lesson. One of the other students had a brother who was sick with AIDS, and it was a talking-point in the class; he later, as i was pretty-much sure then, came out as gay, and we’ve chatted a little on facebook since then. So, I guess I hijacked and made this story all about me, but we{I’d like to mention that, since I brought it up, I deeply thank Ryan White for being my sort of long-lost friend and compadre, even though, of course he was not gay, but subjected to homophobic and irrational, AIDS-phobia and social ostracism within his school peers and neighborhood environment. Thank you, Ryan, for being so brave. We miss you. } So that’s my ramble for today; If the disease won’t kill the gays, the death of a thousand paper-cuts at our souls would effectively do the truck instead. I lived. I am healthy. I am okay, and struggling along, like everyone, to find and keep love and faith and friendship, a decent and confortable and rewarding life. And telling our stories, at least to me, is very-much a part of taking ‘lemons and making lemonade’, to be easily-trite and simplistic. But know that hate and harm hurts, and it kills us at least as often as we gay, bi or trans-people have been wiped-off the planet by disease. ACT-Up slogan, which was important to me, even though i was just a boy when I read it and memorized it: “Kissing doesn’t kill. Greed and indifference do.” Peace, and have a good and safe and sane holiday season. -Daniel

@Dinodogstar: @Dinodogstar: @Dinodogstar: I am sorry for the length of this, and, clearly, I went off on a tangent, and made the story about me, and my need and aching desire, really, to tell; to ‘do ask, do tell’, so-to-speak. We HAVE to be out, as gay men, as trans-people, as Lesbians-of-Color, on and on, to what ever PC titles that we may feel limited by, but in need to taking on, to change the game for the better. Come out if you can, and if you can, then please do it as soon as possible. Everyday, several young lgbt die from suicide–many of any and every sexuality or identity also die each day from illnesses like AIDS, and any and every way we humans allow that to happen, or more disturbingly, find a way to make that a reality. People are STILL dying from this disease, and it has never been more true, I think, when the words ‘AIDS’ and ‘HIV’ no longer occupy front-page, or even last page newspaper space of importance, that “Silence DOES EQUAL Death”. It’s not trite or silly or out-dated, when AIDS is still very-much NOT an out-dated concern, however it’s being treated and considered wrongly, as such. Peace.

I have a Chinese friend whose father called him from Hong Kong and ordered him to get a place where he could buy and use his own laundry machines because he thought you could catch HIV from using the same washer as someone who is positive…

@edfu: Is this still considered valid and good, sound science and medicine? After all the pain and death and suffering, if it IS still true, then let’s just say it’s so, and work from there…nope, not a fan of the taste of latex condoms, and even the flavored ones lack that, je ne sais quoi, um, i guess dck flavor..? I’ve kissed more than a few princess in my long career of hos-in’, and a few were positive.. i know that anecdotal evidence to prove or support a position is a fallacy of reasoning, but I will take pretty-much any position I can take..